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While the Chinese and South Korean interventions were anchored in public health interest, the US’s will be driven by commercial interest

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17 March 2020 - 14:08 ISMAIL LAGARDIEN

On major US news platforms and networks, with the exception of Fox, there is some unanimity that the Covid-19 virus will be the undoing of the Donald Trump presidency. I am not sure of that. This “decline” has been written about as long as one cares to remember. Naomi Wolf wrote about it in The End of America in 2007, and Oswald Spengler wrote about it 100 years ago, so it’s probably best if we adopt a wait-and-see approach.

However, what I will be bold enough to say is that the pandemic may hasten the decline of the US (and rise of China), and expose the general weaknesses of “the American model” that was so successfully exported to the rest of the world. There’s an old saying: as goes the US, so goes the world. Apologies if I sound like a stuck record. The US established, in its image, the institutions that hold together the postwar liberal capitalist order. Ask any of the experts and they will probably look to the US (especially Wall Street), as a lightning rod, or the prov...

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